XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the important pages of a website to help search engines discover and crawl them more efficiently. It includes URLs along with metadata such as last modification date, change frequency, and priority (though modern search engines largely ignore priority). XML sitemaps are especially useful for large sites, pages with few internal links, or new content that hasn’t yet earned many backlinks. They should be submitted via Google Search Console and kept under 50,000 URLs or 50MB per file (use sitemap indexes for larger sites). While not a ranking factor, sitemaps improve indexing coverage and provide diagnostic data in GSC.